Empirically measuring abiotic material complexity for origin-of-life hypotheses

Determine experimentally tractable methods to measure, compute, and investigate the structural complexity of abiotic materials, in order to rigorously test hypotheses that specific material configurations causally contributed to the emergence of genetic information at the origin of life.

Background

The paper motivates a need to quantify the complexity of inorganic materials and minerals because they may have played a role in pre-genetic processes leading to life. The authors discuss how specific configurations of abiotic materials could have contributed to a "frozen accident" that enabled genetic heredity and the evolution of the genetic code.

Assembly Theory is presented as a framework for measuring physical complexity, but its extension to periodic solid-state objects and real materials requires methods that can be empirically tested. The explicit open question focuses on how to develop measurement and analytical approaches that make these origin-of-life hypotheses testable.